Reply 20 of 46, by jal
- Rank
- Oldbie
wrote:The OPLx chips were FM synthesis chips made by Yamaha. Variants can also be found in old arcade machines and video game consoles (I think the Sega Genesis uses an OPL4). I don't know what OPL stands for (Google would probably know!)
OPL stands for "(FM) Operator Type L". I think only the Japanese at Yamaha know what type "L" means. There also used to be a type "N", "LL", "L2" etc.
wrote:The Sound Blaster, SB 2.0, and Adlib all used an OPL2, which was used in many old games to produce music.
Many of the Yamaha chips were used in all kinds of home computers like Atari and MSX, and in many game consoles. An interesting overview can be found at:
http://members.chello.nl/h.otten/vortexion.htm
wrote:The SB 16 had an OPL3 chip, which was a single chip capable of producing stereo music - although apparently in a different enough way from the SB Pro that games using stereo music had to specifically support it.
The problem with the "stereo" was that per channel you could only choose between left, right and center, so real panning was impossible.
wrote:About CMS: (...) Definitely and improvment over the PC internal speaker, but not as good as the Adlib! For example, it doesn't seem to be able to do percussion sounds (which the OPL chips are actually decent at)
The CMS was basically a multi channel PC speaker. Really nasty sounds 😀.
wrote:EDIT: I'm also pretty sure that the SB 2.0 that was my first sound card had a socket and jumper for a CMS chip, but I never saw CMS chips for sale anywhere. I was always curious about how they sounded (until yesterday 😀)
They were on sale at least here in the Netherlands, a friend of mine actually bought them and installed them on his SB2. Some of the older games had GameBlaster support, but no AdLib/SB support.
JAL